Hear Amelia Earhart's VOICE like never before: Scientists use AI to enhance a recording logged two years before the pilot's disappearance

Scientists have used AI to enhance a historical recording of Amelia Earhart, making her voice sound clearer than ever before.

The clip, first broadcast in 1935, is a snippet from a speech the trailblazing pilot gave on radio about a woman’s place in science.

While her words remain intelligible, the recording is plagued by muffled audio and persistent background noise. 

Now, a new AI tool called Diffio has stripped away much of the static and distortion, making it sound as though Earhart is speaking directly into a modern microphone.

The result offers one of the clearest listens yet to the pioneering aviator's voice – and it was recorded just two years before she disappeared on one of the final legs of a circumnavigational flight of the globe.

Nathanael Harmon, Diffio’s founder, said: ‘History feels different when you can hear someone speak. 

'With Amelia Earhart, it’s a chance to hear the person behind the photographs and the extraordinary story. 

'Making these recordings easier to listen to can help future generations connect with people they’ve only read about.'

In the 1935 radio address, Earhart argues that women have benefited more than almost any other group from advances in science and technology.

It has reduced the ‘drudgery’ of domestic life and given women greater independence, she argues.

To enhance the original recording, the AI restoration tool removed much of the static, hiss and distortion that had built up over the decades

By isolating and rebuilding the voice, it transformed the crackly historic audio into something that sounds far closer to a modern recording.

In the improved clip, Earhart can clearly be heard saying: ‘Profound and stirring as have been accomplishments in the remoter fields of pure research, it is in the home that the applications of scientific achievement have perhaps been most far-reaching, and it is through changing conditions there that women have become the greatest beneficiaries in the modern scheme.’

She goes on to highlight aviation as one of the most dramatic achievements of modern science, describing flight as a field where women have an important role to play.

Just two years later, on July 2, 1937, Earhart’s final fatal flight departed Lae Airfield in Papua New Guinea.

She, along with navigator Fred Noonan, were heading east with a destination of Howland Island, a trip of 2,556 miles.

Both were communicating with a nearby Coast Guard ship, USCGC Itasca, before their plane lost contact.

In the last in-flight radio message heard by Itasca, Earhart said: 'We are on the line 157 337…. We are running on line north and south.'

The numbers 157 and 337 referred to compass headings – 157° and 337° – and described a line passing through their intended destination, Howland Island.

A popular and relatively straightforward theory is that the plane crashed into the sea when it ran out of fuel and then sank.

Both Earhart and Noonan were either instantly killed upon impact or were unable to get out and drowned, the theory goes.

The tragic loss has spawned more fantastical theories, including that they were eaten by crabs and imprisoned by the Japanese.

It's generally agreed that the wreckage lies beneath the waves near the planned destination Howland Island or another island around 350 miles south-east called Nikumaroro.